Video Transcript

Tags are a useful tool in organizing and searching your obsidian data and they are really easy to create. I've already got a couple on this note right here. You can see it's got the pound sign plus the tag name after it. That's all there is to creating a new tag. Like if I wanted to make one for dining, I would just hit pound sign and then type dining.

Now you know this is similar to an H1 heading which we covered in the markdown section earlier in this course, but the difference is the space. If you put a space there, it becomes a heading one. If you remove the space, it becomes a tag. And you can see it just auto filled for me. That was not what I wanted it to do. So I'll put dining there, not dinning. There we go, dining. And now we've got a tag for dining.

You can add as many as you want to a document, then you can search them out later, making it really easy to get to those tags. And it's a great way to find ways to filter your data. In fact, there are some plugins, one of which I'll cover in the community plugins, that uses tagging to your great advantage. So one recommendation I would make is just keep the tags all lowercase. That way there's never a question in your mind whether you need to capitalize a word or not and that's also a nice way to distinguish them as tags.

Now you can also use tags with the YAML front matter data in your note. There is a way to put metadata at the top of a document and the way you do that is with three dashes. So I'll go up here, we'll go to the first line, hit one, two, three dashes, then another line and hit one, two, three dashes and you can see before I did that you see it turned everything here into the actual markdown code because it was thinking this is front matter metadata but as soon as I put the second one in there then I'm seeing this is okay the rest of the stuff is not metadata anything between these two dashes is so I can make tags that way as well I could say tag colon Anaheim comma Star Wars and I just added two tags to it by doing that. So I'll go ahead and search for those. Tag colon and there's Anaheim and there's Star Wars. You can see now I can search those as well.

Now if you'd like you can also nest your tags. So we could change these tags and use a slash to do that. So for instance this one Disneyland, I'll say Disneyland slash attraction and then we'll also do one called Disneyland slash dining. Alright and now we can delete these two tags and now we have two tag levels here we've got the first level is Disneyland and the second is dining so if we search for the tag Disneyland you'll see that it finds both tag groups so we had multiple notes and some were tagged with Disneyland dining and some were tagged with Disneyland attractions it would allow us to distinguish between them in our search.

And finally, there's a few rules when making tags. As I already said, I believe you should leave them all lowercase, but you can make them upper and lowercase if you want, but it will affect your search if you get it wrong. Tags must contain at least one non-numerical character. So if we had a tag that was 1984, that wouldn't actually be a tag. But if If we put Macintosh-1984, that would be a tag. And you'll note that in lieu of spaces, I'm using dashes. You could also use underscores. But you can't have a space in your tag. If you put a space in, then just that first word becomes the tag, and the second word gets removed. As soon as you put a dash in there or an underscore, then you've got a tag with both words.

If you have a big vault, I recommend spending some time coming up with a tagging strategy and then start implementing them. You'll see as we get into some of the community plugins that these tags can be really useful with some of these additional features added. But even just for a basic searching mechanism, tags can be really handy.